There are many circumstances in which a user must explore vast quantities of data. In business intelligence applications, this may be done in order to diagnose a problem, understand a cause and effect, or discover trends. Often, such tasks utilize query and reporting tools to search a data warehouse, which permit a user to drill down and examine data that is presented in tabular and/or graphical formats. In effect, a user is exploring an information space in much the same way that an Internet user explores the Web. In fact, the user interface for exploring an information space is often a Web browser.
Sharing a user's observations in exploring an information space (e.g., data warehouse, Web site etc.) may be just as important as the user's initial exploration of the information space, but is often more difficult. Some approaches require a user to bookmark a location of a data view using the Web browser's own bookmarking utility. However, there may not be a uniform resource locator (URL) associated with the data shown in the Web browser. In other cases, a URL itself may not change, even though the Web browser's content has changed. The latter may occur where the contents of a Web page are built up incrementally or where the contents of the Web page itself has changed since the page was bookmarked by a user.
Other approaches to sharing data views include taking screenshots of each data view. However, users with whom such screenshots are shared are not able to examine or manipulate the data themselves and cannot rerun query results to obtain a current state of the database.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.